Intervention(s)
Considering the most universally accepted aspects andon which students of the philosophy of logic are in agreement, we can think of Analysis in the educational environment as inquiry-based learning, in which the students build knowledge and abilities from their own by trials and errors. The learning process is slow but the concepts are deeply understood since they are rebuilt from the interior. On the other hand, through synthesis students are guided through the concepts. It may result in a lack of grasp on the learned notions, but the process is fast and it works in various contexts, including large classes. Throughout an analysis-based approach, students are guided along a process that helps the development of the ability to ”build” their knowledge from testing ideas and approaches based on their previous knowledge and experience by applying these new situations and integrating the newly acquired knowledge with preexisting intellectual constructs. We refer to this ability as Constructive Skill. This concept contrasts with the one of Applied skill, which consists in practical skills, knowledge and tools related to a specific context needed to do some specific task. I present an RCT aimed to assess the causal effect of analysis on the development of Constructive Skill, validating one of the most important theoretical assumptions of the paper. The trial is structured as follows: I use an educational path based on the method of analysis, BUL, to produce an exogenous variation in the amount of Analisys which is done. This project is conducted in two classes of a Roman primary school. In the other exercise, the educational path choosen is called TALES and the treatment and the control groups are from a primary school in Cameroon. Then, Constructive skill is measured for every child of the class and for the children of the other class with the same main teacher but that are not undertaking the project, both before and after the period in which the project is undergone. To measure constructive skill, two different proxies are used: an IQ test for children(repeated both before and after the treatment) and a set of logical questions taken from INVALSI tests (different at each measurement, to capture mental elasticity). Concerning the first trial, the one already conducted in Rome, we built the IQ measure following the MENSA criteria. The results gave me a normal shape for the distribution of the IQs, with the average being near 100 (respectively 101, 100 and 104). From the balancing tests the covariates related to nationality of origin, sex and age result to have similar distribution between the control class and the treatment class. The first return test is conducted just two months after the first one and is likely to be strongly influenced by learning effects due to the memory of questions performed only two months earlier. The test will be repeated during the next year- where the treatment will also continue -, both to quantify the entity of these learning effects and isolate them, and to verify the effects of the treatment after more prolonged exposure. intelligence and nationality have a relevant and significant effect in both exercises. The impact of the second is not very surprising, as it is evident that children with parents of foreign nationalities face language barriers that slow down not only the learning possibilities but also the effectiveness of an IQ test as these children have to do a greater effort to understand some questions. Furthermore, this effect becomes greater if the language spoken at home is not Italian. As regards our variable of interest, we note that the effect on the treatment IQ is not significant. This is probably due to the persistence of memory effects, as discussed above, combined with the possibility that IQ measures a set of skills related to the g factor, while the Analysis method favors a particular component, the one close to the concept of measured mental elasticity. For both of these two reasons, in fact, the second exercise reveals a significant effect of the treatment. In order to distinguish the weight and relevance of each of these two topics, the subsequent return tests will be fundamental, which will allow isolating the memory effect. The trial in the primary school in Cameroon will be conducted with the same methodology.